I came up with an idea for a program that allowed you to enter words and their translations, which could then be searched either way. It's more complex than a database, since some words mean more than one thing (moneo, as an example). So if you were trying to find the translation for 'cogitare,' you could enter it and the program would spit out the various meanings. You could also search from English to Latin (or whatever language was being used).

I'm not sure if this is doable in Access; it might be, but I'm not that experienced with it. Has anyone else here come up with a way to do this, or is there a program out there I could snag?

I don't know any reason why you couldn't use Access... I'm not sure that it's your best option unless you are looking for portability. A mySQL db would be much nicer... but it's up to you. And of course it depends on what scripting language you are using...

I've been thinking of making just such a thing in Access (I'm an Access programmer). It's not that difficult to make it, but I haven't done it yet, because I know myself: I will end up making a program that will also give you all possible grammar information (archaic forms, Greek forms, i-stems, irregular comparison, you name it). In the end, I will have a wonderful program, and I will have spent hours on Latin without actually learning it.

Hmm...I might still do it, of course. If someone would tell me to have it ready by next monday, it might even be a simple program .

Ingrid

PS: I've got this wonderful design of a library-database, that lists all possible biographical information about the authors, contents of collections of stories, first lines, etc.; all searchable of course...someday I'm going to build it.

PPS: the advantage of Perseus is, of course, that you don't have to enter the data yourself. If you speak Dutch, try www.latijnnederlands.nl, it's a dictionary that you can search both ways.

It is certainly doable with Access. I've done something similiar with an Active-X component in Visual Basic using an Access database. So it can be done. It's how loose word order is in Latin which always made it a daunting task. Adam McLean did something similiar with external files in his Latin Parser.
Good luck.